


Come Back and Haunt Me

by stardropdream



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 10:06:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/697104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardropdream/pseuds/stardropdream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How the reborn Sakura came to understand the past, present, and future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Back and Haunt Me

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LJ May 25, 2011. 
> 
> This is my take on how Mamakura's memories of her past self work - I don't think it was so much that she was 'reborn' with every single memory (because what a depressing toddler that would be...) but, rather, that she rediscovered them alongside the timeline of her past life. Er. If that makes sense. It probably doesn't make sense. Anyway.

The dreams started as early as she can remember them. Always the same kind of dream, but always different, like watching a memory. They are dreams of a girl with the same face as her, with the same name, but she is not the same. She is not herself. She is watching someone who looks like herself, but is not herself.   
  
The first dream she ever remembers having is when she was four. The dream is of a little girl, a little princess, with the same face and name as her, who was walking along the long hallways of a castle in a desert, who tripped suddenly. She fell and cried out in surprise. And then there was a man there—a man who was not her own father, but was this dream girl’s father—and he helped her up, smiling kindly and telling her that she should be careful.  
  
The dreams were always like this. Never anything spectacular, never anything noteworthy. Just everyday moments, things that happened over the course of one day. The dreams were always the same like this. The dreamed spanned the course of one day, from the moment the dream girl woke up to the moment the dream girl went to sleep. As soon as the dream girl went to sleep, she herself would wake up in her normal world, a world away from deserts and castles and princesses.   
  
Aside from this dream father, there was a dream brother and a dream brother’s friend. These were faces she recognized, at least. The dream brother was the same as her brother. The dream friend was the same as her brother’s friend. She did not know the dream father. There was no dream mother. They were different from her own mother and father.   
  
The dreams continued every night, without fail. It was as if she was living a life running parallel to her own life. Two lives at the same time, memories of the day and memories of the night. Her head became full of it, full of memories so that she could not identify right away, sometimes, whether the memory she was recalling was her own, or a dream.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
At the age of seven, someone new enters the dreams. First, her real father arrives, smiling and kind and leading a young boy she’s never seen before. In the dream, her real father is not her father, but rather this boy’s father—adopted father. The boy’s name is Syaoran. He looks down, blushing slightly, and doesn’t say anything right away. But her dream self knows exactly what to do. She steps forward with a smile and takes his hand in hers, promises they’ll be friends.   
  
After that, most of the dreams involve herself and Syaoran. Her feelings for Syaoran grow alongside her dream self’s feelings. He becomes a good friend, someone reassuring, someone kind. He is someone that she recognizes instantly, someone who, when she sees him coming in the dreamscape, means she is instantly reassured, instantly happier, instantly okay. She learns to look forward to sleeping, look forward to the dreams—to another play-date in her dreamscape.   
  
She wonders if her dream father and this dream Syaoran have parallels in real life. She is young, still only eight, when she thinks this. Touya, Yukito, Fujitaka—they are all in her dreams, but it is only these two who she has never seen. She looks out extra closely during schooldays, walking home from school, looking out for someone she knows she will identify instantly.   
  
The dreams continue like this. The dreams grow with her. On her birthday, she celebrates with her family. The night of her birthday, she dreams of another celebration, dreams of a long, expansive dinner party that she celebrates with Syaoran, who has her birthday as well.   
  
She dreams. She realizes, at the age of twelve, that her dream self is in love with Syaoran, and she’s in love with him in turn. She realizes it through all the awkward politeness he has grown into, the unsure smiles, the gentleness with which he treats her, the way he fumbles when her dream self insists _just Sakura, okay? Not Sakura-hime._ She realizes, at about the same time, that her feelings are so entwined with her dream self, that she cannot think of a time when she didn’t love Syaoran.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
And when she turns fourteen, everything changes. She hears a ringing bell, she watches her dream self rising towards the ruins that have always loomed in the distance of her dreams.   
  
She wakes up with a chill running down her spine, and a fear that grips her—a fear that she can’t shake away for the rest of the day, even when her brother teases her and wonders why he hasn’t heard a long rendition of her dream (for she tells him most of the dreams, when he asks, and finds it both strange and fascinating how her real brother’s reactions to Syaoran mirror her dream brother’s).   
  
She waits for night to fall. She passes through the real day like a dream, waits expectantly on her pillow for sleep to claim her—  
  
  
\---  
  
  
She is not disappointed. The morning passes normally, but as it creeps closer to the afternoon, her dream self runs to the ruins, to meet Syaoran, who is always working there lately, it seems. She’s all smiles, falls into Syaoran’s waiting hands, with the determination that she will tell him—finally tell him how she feels. And her own heart grips in anticipation for her dream self, but she cannot shake the moment of dread.  
  
She watches her dream self’s eyes fall to the ground, takes in the sight of the unfurling wings that paints across the floor of the ruins. She watches her walk, as if in a trance, to the center of the image, kneel down, and touch it. The magic explodes and suddenly there is nothing—  
  
“No—!” she shouts, and it is the first time she has ever spoken in her dreams, the first time she has ever done something other than watch the scenes play out before her. But she can do nothing.   
  
The magic churns around her until she cannot see—  
  
She wakes up—  
  
And there is nothing.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
She feels light-headed as she sits up, letting a hand fall to her forehead. Her brow furrows. But there is nothing. She cannot remember if she dreamed or not. She blinks her eyes a few times, to clear away the sleep, and then pads downstairs to the kitchen.   
  
Her father is making breakfast, and her brother is already at the table, reading the newspaper.   
  
“Hey, Monster,” he says as greeting.   
  
She furrows her brow, because it sounds familiar, as if she’s heard it so many times before. She reminds herself that, yes, of course she has. Her brother often calls her monster. She puffs her cheeks up.   
  
“I am not a monster!” she says, stomping to the table and dropping down into a chair, scowling at the newspaper that blocks her brother’s face from view.   
  
“Yeah, yeah,” Touya says with a dismissive shrug she can just picture him issuing from behind the front page. She doesn’t pout, but the feeling to do so is there. “So, what? Usually by now you’re telling us all about whatever dream of that brat you had last night.”  
  
She opens her mouth, prepared to defend—who?   
  
She closes her mouth and furrows her brow. “What do you mean?”  
  
The newspaper shifts, and her brother is giving her an incredulous look.   
  
“Are you kidding me?” he asks. “It’s not like you haven’t talked about it for the past ten years.”  
  
She frowns, staring at the kitchen table, trying to summon up some kind of memory, trying to figure out _what her brother is talking about._ Her head feels too empty, and everything is in disarray in her memories. She doesn’t know what to do, what to think, what to say—  
  
She lifts her head and gives her brother a hopeless look.  
  
Her father notices the expression before her brother, and he walks to her side, touching her shoulder. “Are you feeling well?”  
  
She goes to shake her head, but stops. “I… don’t know,” she admits. “I…”  
  
Touya lets the newspaper fall away from his face and he folds it up, frowning, his brow furrowed. He doesn’t say anything, but she can tell he’s concerned, too.   
  
She presses a hand to her forehead again, as if that would spark some kind of explanation. She bites the inside of her cheek, and then finally shakes her head.   
  
“I don’t know…”  
  
“You should go lie back down, in that case,” her father says, kindly, expression sympathetic. She’s known it all her life, and yet it still looks vaguely familiar, as well, as if it is something that she’s seen in an old photograph, a face she recognizes and yet is not her father’s.  
  
She closes her eyes and sighs out. “Yeah… maybe you’re right.”   
  
She lingers at the table for a moment longer, then stands and wanders away.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
That night, she does not dream.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Nor the next night.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
She does not know it, though. Her father and brother are still concerned, because she still wanders as if the real world is a dream. They ask her about her dreams, and all she can say is that she doesn’t know what they mean—she has never had a dream. If she thinks back on it, she can say in all honesty that she has never had a dream in her life. There is nothing she remembers. She sees the way her brother and father exchange looks, but cannot tell why.   
  
But one night, she finally dreams. First, there is the warm dream of childhood that swims in her memory. It’s a sunset over a desert, some kind of ruins in the background. She stands at the balcony, looking out over it.   
  
And then in the dream, she opens her eyes, and someone is holding her hand and staring down at her. His face lights up when he sees her and he calls her name—her real name—and her dream self stares up at him and asks him who he is.   
  
She feels the pang in her heart when she sees the way his face compresses into crushing defeat. Her dream self does not recognize it. Her dream self sits up, slowly, eyes hooded and confused. This boy introduces himself, introduces her—  
  
She feels as if she has heard this before, but she can’t place it. A princess in a country far away, her name, her face—the same as her own, but different. There are two others in the doorway, two men she has never seen before.   
  
She’s lost her memories, she’s told. They’re on a journey to reclaim them.   
  
Presently, her dream self is left alone, and she’s left to cradle the hand to her chest and wonder who it is who had such warm hands. She watches her dream self settle back down to sleep. She stands, watching her, and then out the window, where she sees a boy standing in the room—  
  
And he is achingly familiar. She feels as if she’s always known him, and the urge to run out into the rain after him is strong. But she cannot. She feels the undeniable urge to move, to not just sit by and watch these scenes play out. But she cannot move. She is tethered to her dream self, who is resting there.   
  
And as her dream self falls away to sleep, she herself wakes up.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
She picks at her breakfast that morning. Her thoughts are heavy, of this first dream she has ever experienced. She frowns at her food, poking at it but unable to eat it. A princess from a faraway land on a journey with three (four, if you count the strange Mokona) other people to find her memories, so that her memories can be returned to her.   
  
“I forgot all the dreams I had before,” she says.   
  
Touya looks up from his newspaper. “What?”  
  
She looks at him. “You said that I used to always tell you my dreams, right? What were they about?”  
  
“Some princess in a desert,” Touya says, seriously, frowning. “You had the same kind of dream every night since you were four. You don’t remember.”  
  
She frowns, and shakes her head. “I don’t remember…”  
  
  
\---  
  
  
The dreams return after that, though. At first they are not much. At first, it is only short dreams, of her dream self waking up, walking around a little, having memories returned to her. She cannot move much at first. Without her memories, she cannot function well at all. Her dream self falls asleep often, forcing her to wake up just as abruptly.   
  
But slowly the memories return to her. They travel different worlds, her dream self falls asleep less often. There is magic, there is adventure, there are betrayals, moments together, and through it all, there is the ever-constant face of that boy—the first thing her dream self saw when she woke up. Syaoran.   
  
There is Moko-chan, Kurogane-san, and Fay-san. But there is, above all else, Syaoran-kun. He is the one she sees the most, whenever her dream self is awake.   
  
It is in one country that her dream self makes the realization, and it is on that realization that she herself realizes, too—  
  
“I knew you before, didn’t I?”   
  
And just as quickly as she speaks it, her dream self shudders and collapses. Syaoran is concerned, but soon her dream self wakes up—and does not remember.   
  
But she does. Her dream self forgets, but she herself does not forget. And she can realize it’s true. There are rips in the memories, of the past dreams she is only beginning to remember again. There are long, black tears in her memories, as if someone should be there. And she knows who it is.   
  
In her dream, she steps forward. No one has ever seen her in these dreams, no one has ever been aware of her presence. All she knows is that she is tethered to her dream self. She looks at Syaoran’s face, sees the pain there, and recognizes again, all the familiarity she feels whenever she sees him, despite having never met him before.  
  
“Yes,” she says to herself, because no one else can hear her, “You are the one I have forgotten.”   
  
  
\---  
  
  
The dreams continue, the journey continues. She remembers more and more.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
But she again realizes too late that she loves him. She realizes when, trapped away from them all, she sees the happy world they’d created crash down around them. Watches the way the person she loves, the person most important to her, leave her behind without looking back.  
  
The feather is returned to her, and she understands, then—that she is only a copy, she is only a replacement, she is not real—  
  
She understands, too late, how much she wanted him to always stay—  
  
  
\---  
  
  
Everything falls apart. She knows what her dream self is, knows who did these things to her. And she feels the pain as if it is her own. She loves Syaoran, too, has always loved him, and to see him go, to see the destruction he leaves behind.  
  
She feels the pain of the injuries, the pain in her heart. She knows what her dream self is feeling, knows that, if she could, she, too, would do whatever it took to give him back his heart.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Her family notices the difference in her character almost instantly. She is no longer as cheerful as she once was. She moves through life as if it is a dream. She searches, endlessly, for even a glimpse in the crowd of eyes she knew so well. She searches for him, for Syaoran. Through all her dreams, she has never seen anyone like those she has grown to love so tenderly. But she knows that they must exist somewhere out there.   
  
The stars, the moon, everything seemed to dissolve away when the night fell. She dove into her bed, prayed for swift sleep, so that she can continue her search in her dreams, as well.  
  
But it is not the same. It is no longer happy, it is no longer gentle. It is a cold world they go to, it is the stilted, stifling silence that they fall into. Her dream self is keeping secrets. Her dream self is in pain, and can’t tell anyone.   
  
She sits on the bed as her dream self rests, saddened, staring at the unhealed leg she paid as a price for the one who looks like Syaoran, but is not Syaoran. When he’d first appeared, she’d thought that perhaps he was like her—someone watching from the sidelines, watching someone with his face and his name, but was not him. But no, she could not interact with this Syaoran, either. And it caused her dream self pain to look at him. She sits and watches her dream self collapse into herself, and wishes she could take her hand, wishes she could reassure her—  
  
But she does not have the words to reassure. She is sad, too. She does not know what to do. She does not know how they can ever win against the one who has orchestrated all of this. She does not know what she can do. All she can do is sit by and watch.   
  
She hates it more than anything else.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
She watches, horrified, as the sword passes through her body, as her soul dissolves away into cherry blossoms. She cannot move.   
  
All she can do is scream.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
She wakes up in a cold sweat, sure that, now, she will never again have another dream. It is over now. Her dream self is dead. She feels the ache in her gut so acutely. She understands nothing. She’d known that it was possible, could see it in her dream self’s eyes. But she hadn’t—  
  
When she said she’d do anything to get his heart back, she’d meant it. And only now did she understand, truly. She couldn’t move from her bed for the entire day. She stayed still, claimed she was ill. Her father and brother were concerned, she could tell. But she didn’t have the words to tell them what she had seen.   
  
She’d long since run out of the ability to tell them of the things she saw in her dreams. They saw the change in her, watched the melancholy set in, but there was nothing that she could do. She clenched her eyes shut, as if maybe she could bring sleep back to her, awake in the dream and see her dream self alive and well.  
  
But it could not be the case. Her dream self had died to give back what had been stolen, to give back the heart to the person she loved the most.   
  
And she couldn’t even tell him how she felt. Again, it was ripped away from her. The memories of this dream self’s life weighed in her heart—the childhood memories, the traveling memories. They all weighed in her heart, along with the memories she herself had lived. Three pairs of memories, and yet none of them felt like her own.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
But no, there is a dream after that one. It comes after many nights of dreamless sleeps.   
  
It is a small dream, a painful dream. The cherry blossoms collect, her body reforms, and she opens her eyes.   
  
And when she turns her head, there he is. With two brown eyes, staring at her. He starts, reaches out a hand to her, calls to her.  
  
But stops. He does not approach.   
  
Her dream self opens her eyes, keeps them open, stares at him.   
  
Their eyes lock, and stay locked.   
  
The witch is there.   
  
_When you are reborn, you will remember the memories of your past lives—_  
  
Things fall into place and, through it all, there is that shiver that ran down her spine as she watches her dream self and Syaoran look at one another, understand one another, and take one another’s hands.   
  
“I can finally say it,” her dream self whispers, as the magic swirls around them, as they prepare to be reborn, “I love you.”   
  
“… Me too,” he says, in return, quiet, his hands not letting her go until the magic pulled them apart, only for a short time—  
  
To meet again—  
  
To find each other again—  
  
  
\---  
  
  
When she wakes up, she understands.   
  
It weighs down on her, but she understands.   
  
It is not a distant fantasy, it is two sets of memories. Her memories. Her past self’s memories.   
  
She closes her eyes and breathes in, her entire body shuddering.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
She never dreams again. Not like this.  
  
All she can do is find Syaoran, all she can do is finish what was started. She knows that, this time, she’ll be able to do something—she won’t be only one looking in on memories in a dreamscape. She will do something. She will finish it all.   
  
She will end it all. With him.


End file.
